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About Englicious

Getting started: an Introduction to the site

What is Englicious?

  • an entirely free online library of original English language teaching resources, especially grammar
  • contains lesson plans, exercises, videos, assessment materials, etc.
  • relevant for KS1 - KS5 students and teachers
  • contains a complete grammar of English for reference purposes
  • contains an extensive Glossary of terms
  • closely tailored to the linguistic content of 2014 National Curriculum for England
  • includes Grammar, Spelling and Punctuation (SPaG) test practice material.
  • uses authentic ag

About ICEBox

ICEBoxTraditional grammars have relied on ‘made-up’ examples. Englicious is different.

Instead of example sentences like

  • The cat sat on the mat

we have examples like

Englicious and cookies

What are cookies?

You may have heard stories in the press about 'cookies'. Cookies are small units of data that are stored on your computer that can be created and accessed by a website. Cookies allow one web page to store some information and make it accessible by another. They are necessary for many sites, and should be harmless. 

Finding and using materials

Searching in the Resources window

New, only in Beta mode!

Englicious has a new powerful search screen. Click on the Resources button at the top of the page to see it.

Getting help

How to get help

Englicious contains a lot of information that we hope will be helpful to teachers.

New! Guided Grammar Lessons for Yr 2

Hello!

This new course was part of a research project and grammar and writing, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. We are now making it available to everyone.

It consists of 10 lessons that are designed to cover the grammar requirements for Key Stage 1, Year 2 of the National Curriculum for England.

Privacy Notice

This is the privacy notice for the Englicious website.

It explains in plain English what data we collect on registered users and the lawful purposes we use this data for.

It also explains what you can do if at any time you are unhappy with how we process your data.

A separate page explains about Cookies, which are small bits of data used as part of the interface to Englicious to make it work.

User data is different from cookies. User data is personal data as defined in European law, and we are obliged to process it accordingly.

Resources and Reading

Online resources and further reading

Blogs

Grammarianism - A Blog for Teachers of English (Bas Aarts)

Slang Lexicographer - A Blog about Slang (Jonathon Green)

Separated by a Common Language - Observations on British and American English by an American Linguist in the UK (Lynne Murphy)

Adjectives and meaning

A starter activity, where students are asked to replace the given adjectives and discuss the changes in meaning

What are other ways of expressing the meanings conveyed by adjectives? In this starter activity, students are asked to replace the adjectives in the given examples with some other means of expressing the general meaning of the sentence.

The Activity page appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right of this page. It can be displayed on a projector or smart board. The slide in the Activity page presents four example sentences with adjectives. Ask the students to do the following:

Adverbs in use

Analyse the use of adverbs in three short extracts

Task

Three short extracts are given, with each one using adverbs differently. Take each extract in turn and follow these steps:

Clause paths

This is a short game that can be used at the beginning or end of a lesson, to consolidate understanding of single clause sentences, multi clause sentences and subordinate clauses.

Clause types in context

Exploring how different clause types help to construct social meaning

The four clause types are a central part of English grammar. An understanding of declarative, imperative, interrogative and exclamative clause types can help students recognise how writers use these structures to create meaning in different ways, and can help them develop a better repertoire of structures in their own writing.

Clause types in context: Activity

You’re visiting a friend’s house. You’re in a cold room and the window is open. What can you say to each of the following to get the window shut?

  1. your friend
  2. your friend’s grandmother
  3. your friend’s annoying little brother

You’re carrying several boxes of books. Then you drop one, spilling its contents all over the floor. You need help and there are people around who could be of assistance. What do you say to each of the following?

Compound word creation

An interactive activity to explore how compounds are made

In this activity, students work with an interactive smart board display to build compound words.

The Activity pages for this starter can be found in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. Each Activity page contains slides that can be displayed using a projector or smart board. 

Compound word creation: Activity 1

An interactive activity to explore how compounds are made

Compound word creation: Activity 2

See how many compound words you can create from a given word.

For each word, see how many compounds you can think of which include the word.

Expanded noun phrase competition

Creating longer (expanded) noun phrases

Noun phrases can be of any length, from one word to very many words. This activity is a team competition where students' goal is to score as many points as they can by creating longer and longer noun phrases. As they do this, they will implicitly rely on their knowledge of grammar, and they will begin to see a range of different ways to expand noun phrases.

Expanding headlines

Exploring the grammar of newspaper headlines

Newspaper headlines are often not full sentences, but they are nevertheless quite easy to make sense of. In this starter, students will use their implicit knowledge of grammar to expand newspaper headlines into complete sentences, and then explicitly analyse what they've done. The Activity slide show appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. In the Activity slide show, five example headlines are presented. Students should do the following:

Expanding headlines: Activity

  1. Lorry driver cut free after crash
  2. Pakistani PM guilty of contempt
  3. Calls to block £14bn EU bill
  4. Time called on noisy church bells
  5. Australian billionaire to build Titanic II
  6. Chef throws his heart into helping feed needy
  7. Cops halt doughnut shop robbery

 

Neoclassical compounds

In this activity, students analyse neoclassical compounds, which are compounds where often the word elements were taken from the classical languages (ancient Greek and Latin) and were combined in new ways in English (the element neo- comes from the Greek for ‘new’). Neoclassical compounds involve combining forms. They are meaningful elements drawn from Greek and Latin, which can combine with other elements to form words.

Activity 1

Nonsense words and grammar

In this starter activity, students are asked to do two things:

1) Work out the word class of different nonsense words, based on the context in which they appear.

2) Write their own grammatical sentences using their own nonsense words.

Begin by asking students to figure out the word class of each word in the following sentence:

The ravenous students quickly devoured a massive pizza.

Nouning verbs

A quick activity looking at how some words can be both nouns and verbs

This is a simple starter activity that will help your students see how some words can function as both nouns and verbs. The activity is designed to be carried out in pairs around the class. One student be the noun and the other will be the verb. Each will need the same word list (which you can download and print below) or you can just use the word list on the screen.

Passives in use

Investigating the effect of using passives

The slides in the Activity page in the right hand menu contain examples of passives from real writing. Have students do the following:

Passives in use: Activity

Extract A (from a student exam paper on emotion)

Furthermore there is evidence that supports these bodily changes as being essential to an emotional state. This evidence involved testing patients with spine severances. The patients were interviewed and tested in a laboratory and results consistently showed that the higher the spine severance the less patients reported being able to ‘feel’ an emotion.

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Englicious contains many resources for English language in schools, but the vast majority of them require you to register and log in first. For more information, see What is Englicious?

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